Science — The Ending and Endless Frontier(s)

José Luis Ricón · 20 Jun 2020

José Luis Ricón did not write this page.

Every claim below was made in this piece, quoted word for word and numbered in the order the piece makes them, so you can read it there rather than take our word for it. The sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording. Each quote was checked against a stored copy of the page at build time; where the two differ, the quote is the fact.

Our reading
Every scientific field eventually exhausts itself: progress within a paradigm follows an S-curve and then runs out.
Mental modelS-curves and diminishing returns

Their wordsA given field or paradigm will yield a sigmoid-like pattern and eventually it will be exhausted.
Our reading
The stock of useful scientific knowledge is bounded rather than endless.

Their wordsI admit I lean towards the bounded view because the former sounds overly optimistic.

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